CSV Dictionary Reader

Overview

We can read CSV files as a sequence of strings, or as a dictionary. When we read the file as a sequence of strings, there are no special provisions for column headers. We’re forced to manage the details of which column has a particular attribute. This is unpleasantly complex, but sometimes necessary.

We can also read a CSV file so each row becomes a dictionary. We can provide a sequence of keys, or the first line of the file can provide the keys. This is relatively common, and it saves a little bit of confusion when the column headers are part of the data.

Bezdek Iris data

We’ve been looking at the Bezdek Iris data for our case study. There’s a copy of the data in the Kaggle repository. The data is also available at the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The UCI Machine Learning Repository file, bezdekIris.data, does not have column titles; these are provided separately in a file named iris.names.

The iris.names file has a great deal of information in it, including this in section 7 of the document: